Intel releases Beacon Mountain Android IDE for Atom chips

CHIPMAKER Intel has released an integrated development environment (IDE) for Android that offers performance tuning for its Atom processors.

Intel's various Atom processors intended for servers, tablets and smartphones are set to receive a significant boost this year with the Silvermont architecture. In the meantime, Intel is busy trying to reinforce its developer support and has announced the Beacon Mountain 0.5 IDE that offers optimisation tools for its Atom processors.

Intel has been doing extensive work porting Google's Android operating system to its x86 architecture, and while most applications that use Android's Dalvik virtual machine will port to Android on x86, applications that make use of Android's native development kit will require a bit more work to ensure operability. The firm's Beacon Mountain IDE is there to help developers port code and then optimise it for Intel's Atom processors both in terms of compute and graphics.

With Intel bundling performance analysers and multithreading libaries within Beacon Mountain, it is clear that the firm wants developers to optimise code for its chips but only for devices that run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean or newer. Intel also said Beacon Mountain 0.5 supports Android development for devices running ARM chips, however the performance analysers and libraries obviously will not work on ARM chips.

Intel's attempt to get developers to optimise their Android code for its processors will only work if it can show that there is an audience out there worth spending time and money trying to attract. For Intel the problem is that until it can get major device manufacturers to use its Atom processors in Android smartphones and tablets, developers will continue to optimise for the most widely used chip architecture, which is ARM.

Intel has released a video detailing the development environment, which you can watch below. µ